Abstract:
This self-study examines Carlos’s journey of shifting from Brazil as a qualified and experienced teacher to become a teacher in a primary school in New Zealand. Using bricolage (Rogers, 2012), the study weaves together the disparate threads involved in being from ‘somewhere else’ as he navigates language differences, curriculum differences, schooling differences, and cultural differences. This rich tapestry of experience is then examined using the concept of praxis to better understand the tensions that emerge between how he thinks about teaching (formed through biography, experience, and formal education) and how he enacts teaching (as it is constrained within schooling contexts). Praxis is a useful lens through which to understand teaching because it captures the dialectic process by which theory becomes enacted, embodied, and informed by practice (Freire, 1987). Rather than positioning such tensions as problematic, the study examines how the differences experienced can be generative for questioning how we reposition, reframe, and re-imagine possibilities for assembling praxis formed from the bricolage of our teaching past.
